Telecommunications is a rapidly growing industry that affects almost every other major industry. Because of the field's rapid growth, the management of resources in telecommunications systems has become more difficult as the systems have become increasingly larger and more complex. In addition to the problems of monitoring any distributed network, modern telecommunications systems include resources that are incapable of autonomous notification, notifying the system that a disruption or failure has occurred without being prompted to provide the information. These resources must be monitored for operational and business-related reasons.
Traditional methods for monitoring these complex, distributed telecommunications systems periodically poll resources to determine whether a failure has occurred. Polling is preferably periodic to minimize bandwidth usage. A result of periodically polling, however, is that resources cannot be monitored with the desired accuracy. Thus, disruptions occurring between consecutive polls may go unnoticed.